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/ 4 December 2007
Ethiopia has warned that the world’s disinterest in sending peacekeepers to Somalia was dampening hopes of achieving peace in the shattered African nation. Of the 8 000 peacekeepers the African Union pledged to send to bolster President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed’s weak government, only 1 500 Ugandan troops are actually on the ground.
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/ 26 November 2007
Kenya has offered asylum to nearly two dozen Somali refugees, yielding to opposition to its plans to deport them to violence-torn Mogadishu, officials said on Monday. A military truck transported the 22 refugees from Nairobi to Kenya’s north-eastern Dadaab refugee camp on Saturday after the government dropped plans to deport them.
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/ 24 November 2007
Insurgents fired a barrage of mortars into an Ethiopian army camp in the Somali capital, Mogadishu, on Friday, triggering heavy fighting, residents said. The clashes shattered a fortnight lull in the city after weeks of heavy fighting that had claimed dozens of lives, mainly of civilians, and displaced at least 200 000 people.
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/ 23 November 2007
A Somali media panel on Friday asked the country’s new Prime Minister, Nur Hassan Hussein, to protect press freedom that has been under siege as the government battles insurgents. The National Union of Somali Journalists appeal came a day after President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed appointed Hussein, a veteran law-enforcement official.
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/ 20 November 2007
The number of Somalis uprooted by fighting in their own country has hit a ”staggering” one million, the United Nations refugee agency said on Tuesday. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees said 600 000 people are believed to have fled Somalia’s lawless capital, Mogadishu, since February.
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/ 20 November 2007
Aid workers are calling it Africa’s biggest humanitarian crisis, but no one has to tell Fatima Usman how rapidly things have gone bad in Somalia. The slender 23-year-old’s son Mohamed died of hunger. So did her daughter Isha. ”I am praying to God that he will not take this baby yet,” she says, gently cradling the wizened face of Muhiadeen, her four-month-old son.
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/ 20 November 2007
A human rights group condemned Kenya on Tuesday for repatriating 18 Somali refugees who had already been turned away from Uganda despite the horrific security situation in their homeland. Ali-Amin Kimathi, chairperson of the Muslim Human Rights Forum, accused Kenyan police officers of beating some of the refugees.
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/ 12 November 2007
A crew member of a Japanese chemical tanker hijacked by pirates off the Somali coast on October 28 escaped and has been rescued after spending two days at sea, a maritime official said on Monday. The Golden Nori was hijacked with 23 crew members aboard, including two South Koreans.
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/ 12 November 2007
Somali and Ethiopian troops shut down Mogadishu’s main market in a search for Islamist insurgents on Sunday after fighting that has killed at least 60 people and driven tens of thousands from the Somali capital. Rights groups have criticised the Ethiopians for failing to distinguish between civilian and insurgent targets.
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/ 8 November 2007
Civilians dragged the body of an Ethiopian soldier through the streets of Somalia’s capital on Thursday after fighting with insurgents killed a second soldier and civilian, witnesses said. In the grisly incident, more than 100 civilians stepped and spat on the scarred body as they dragged it for several kilometres on a pot-holed asphalt road.
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/ 6 November 2007
Hundreds of families were on Tuesday fleeing their homes in Somalia’s southern region of Lower Shabelle, where floods swept villages and destroyed crops, residents and witnesses said. Local elder Abdi Omar Hirabe said floods engulfed the villages of War Gedow, Malable and Dolo Dhere.
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/ 5 November 2007
Two large blasts aimed at a convoy of Ethiopian troops heading toward the capital prompted soldiers to open fire on Monday. At least two Somalis were shot to death, witnesses said. The explosions south of Mogadishu could be heard a kilometre away, and ”shook all the buildings nearby”, resident Mohamed Ahmed said.
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/ 1 November 2007
Three days of fighting in the Somali capital, Mogadishu, displaced 88 000 people from their homes, adding to hundreds of thousands who fled violence earlier this year, the United Nations said on Thursday. In an unprecedented statement, 39 aid agencies also said they could not respond effectively to Somalia’s unfolding ”humanitarian catastrophe” due to insecurity.
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/ 31 October 2007
United States warships are monitoring a Japanese tanker that was hijacked by pirates last weekend off the coast of Somalia. "The pirates are still in control of the ship. They are believed to be armed," Noel Choong, the head of the International Maritime Bureau’s Malaysia-based Piracy Reporting Centre, said.
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/ 30 October 2007
Somali President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed called crisis talks on Tuesday to find a new prime minister as the country’s shaky government faced a mounting challenge from Islamist rebels.
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/ 29 October 2007
Somali Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi resigned on Monday after a long feud with the president that frustrated Western backers and split the government while it faced an Islamist insurgency. With no sure candidate to replace him, it remained unclear whether Gedi’s departure would unify the interim government or set it down a new path of disarray.
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/ 23 October 2007
Somali authorities on Tuesday released the local head of the World Food Programme, who was seized nearly a week ago when government forces stormed a United Nations compound in Mogadishu. "He is safely back in the office. He was brought by some government officers as well as local UN staffers," a UN official said in Mogadishu.
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/ 22 October 2007
Somali pirates have seized a cargo ship off the East African coast, the head of a local seafarers’ association said on Monday. Gunmen attacked the vessel last Wednesday, said Andrew Mwangura, the programme coordinator of the East Africa Seafarers’ Assistance Programme, but due to chaotic communications with Somalia the incident had taken several days to confirm.
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/ 19 October 2007
Somali government forces on Friday battled Islamist insurgents in southern Mogadishu, killing two civilians, witnesses said. Rival forces pounded each other with heavy artillery, forcing many residents to remain indoors while others fled to safety, they said.
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/ 17 October 2007
Up to 60 Somali intelligence officers stormed a United Nations compound in Mogadishu on Wednesday and seized the World Food Programme’s local chief of operations at gunpoint. WFP said it was forced to suspend food distribution, which started on Monday, to more than 75 000 people in the capital Mogadishu.
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/ 11 October 2007
A suicide bomber drove a pickup truck filled with explosives into a Somali army base, killing himself and two others near a hotel where the prime minister set up temporary headquarters, officials said on Thursday. The explosion late on Wednesday, in the southern town of Baidoa, targeted a base manned mostly by Ethiopian troops.
The Somali government has ordered all media organisations to register with the Information Ministry in order to operate in the country, an official said on Friday. ”They must come to my office anytime to register in order to operate. That is what the law says,” Information Minister Madobe Nurrow Mohamed said in the capital, Mogadishu.
Gunmen released a cargo plane and its Russian crew that had been hijacked in northern Somalia, authorities said on Friday. Muse Gelle Yusuf, the governor of the northern Bari region where the plane was taken on Thursday, said that clan elders had managed to convince the two young gunmen to release the plane and its cargo.
Fierce clashes erupted in Mogadishu between Ethiopian-backed Somali forces and Islamist fighters, with both sides claiming to have inflicted heavy casualties, officials and witnesses said on Wednesday. The overnight fighting was focused around the former Defence Ministry building in southern Mogadishu and resulted in a fire in Bakara market.
Somali rivals both claimed control of a disputed northern town on Tuesday after deadly clashes, and more fighting was feared. Tensions have been increasing in the normally calm north because of a border dispute between autonomous Puntland region and the breakaway republic of Somaliland.
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/ 23 September 2007
The United Nations’s new envoy to Somalia, Ahmedou Ould Abdallah, held his first talks in Mogadishu on Saturday with the embattled transitional government’s top leaders, the UN said. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s special representative discussed the results of a recent national reconciliation congress.
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/ 19 September 2007
An influential Somali radio station went off the air on Wednesday after two government soldiers threatened to pound the building with ”machine guns and anti-aircraft missiles”, the radio station’s director said. Shabelle radio shut down one day after police searching for insurgents opened fire outside the station, killing one person.
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/ 18 September 2007
Somali security forces surrounded the independent Shabelle radio station in Mogadishu on Tuesday after firing shots on the building, an Agence France-Presse correspondent reported. The incident came three days after police stormed the radio station, accusing one of its journalists of hurling a grenade at a police patrol and detaining 14 members of staff.
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/ 17 September 2007
Somali leaders meeting in Saudi Arabia said they wanted to replace foreign forces backing the interim government against rebels with Arab and African troops under the aegis of the United Nations. The pact came days after a rival meeting in Eritrea by an opposition alliance that included leaders of the Islamic courts movement.
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/ 16 September 2007
Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki has backed a new Somali opposition alliance, saying arch-foe Ethiopia’s fight against insurgents in Mogadishu was doomed to fail, state media reported on Saturday. The formation of the group, including top Islamist leaders, in Asmara this week has generated yet more friction between Ethiopia and Eritrea.
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/ 12 September 2007
Somali opposition figures meeting in Eritrea united to form a new ”liberation” movement on Wednesday to seek a military or diplomatic solution to conflict in their homeland, a spokesperson said. The main aim of the organisation, called the Alliance for the Liberation of Somalia, is to secure the exit of Ethiopian troops who are backing the interim government in Somalia.
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/ 12 September 2007
Somali Islamist leader Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys dismissed United States terrorism allegations against him and instead blamed Washington for instability in the Horn of Africa, in an interview published on Wednesday. ”The US cannot present any concrete evidence for its unfounded accusations,” Aweys said.